To access the inside, it's simply a matter of removing two screws from the back of the unit and pushing the case forward to separate it from a HDD tray inside. There are no fans anywhere on this unit; it is passively cooled.

Four screws attach the hard drive to the tray. This makes it very secure, but the downside is that there's no way to quickly swap out drives.

Before the enclosure can be closed up, there is one more step. There is a cable that supplies power for the front LED, so don't forget to connect it before putting everything back together. Connecting this cable might prove to be a pain if you have large hands, and it must be disconnected every time you want to install or remove a drive.

When the unit is powered on, the front Vantec logo shines blue and will pulse during drive activity. It looks really nice when idle, but the constant flickering of the LED during drive use became a little distracting.

For testing, I first copied a file that is 4.35GB in size between two SATA II drives in my test PC running Windows XP SP3. It took 1 minute, 38 seconds. Let's see how that compares to USB 2.0 first, and then USB 3.0.

I first connected the enclosure to a USB 2.0 port. Here are the results:

4.35 GB File Transfer (USB 2.0)

Time (minutes:seconds)

Write to Enclosure

2:04

Read from Enclosure

1:59

Next, I connected the enclosure to a USB 3.0 port. Here are the results:

4.35 GB File Transfer (USB 3.0)

Time (minutes:seconds)

Write to Enclosure

1:39

Read from Enclosure

1:37

USB 3.0 performed just as well as SATA II and easily surpassed USB 2.0. In fact, transfer times between USB 3.0 and SATA II were just about equal. Now in regards to external enclosures, some of you may be wondering what the benefit of using USB 3.0 over eSATA is. After all, eSATA provides real-world speeds very close to that of USB 3.0, and it's been available for some time now. The simple answer is that USB 3.0 will be a much more convenient solution for most people, especially the casual user due to its familiarity and ease of use. Backward compatibility with USB 2.0 and 1.1 is a big plus, too.

I'd be curious to see the results of this test if I were to use a 10,000 RPM drive with this enclosure, but unfortunately I don't have one to test with. Even with a 7200 RPM drive there was still a noticeable increase in performance, though.